Instant City: Life And Death In Karachi, by Steve Inskeep

As you might expect from a book written by an NPR writer, the author feels it necessary to show off a knowledge of Karachi’s complicated history as a way of bolstering the page count of what would otherwise be a pretty thin account of a city in trouble because of the violence and greed of the groups that are fighting over its space. It is excusable that an author would have thin material and need to work it up to finish a book when writing about Karachi, a massive and rapidly growing city that the author considers Westerners to misunderstand. Given that what we understand about the city is its massive intergroup violence, which is precisely what the book is about, the author doesn’t seem to have a leg to stand on when saying that Westerners misunderstand it all that much. What is more inexcusable is that the author views the violence of Karachi and considers it a hopeful future that the city would end up–as an optimistic scenario–a city like New York or Chicago, cities which are regularly burdened by immense violence and which ordinary law-abiding people of decent character wish to escape from and have nothing to do with. The author is too wedded to the mistaken idea that in diversity of ethnicities and cultures there is strength to see the violence and hostility of groups fighting over power and turf and unable to accept each other right in the face, in Pakistan or the United States or anywhere else for that matter.

This book is about 250 pages long and is divided into four parts and fifteen chapters. After a note on spelling and an introduction that talks about the spread of Karachi far beyond the plans of its designers and planners, the first part of the book discusses a series of terrorist attacks that took place in Karachi in late 2009 and early 2010, as well as an arson attack on some markets in highly desirable real estate within the city of Karachi. At the point when the author is about to mention a secondary attack on a hospital, he then takes a long and winding discursion for the next five chapters for the entire second part of the book. During these five chapters, the author talks about the importance of Jinnah to the growth of Karachi in the aftermath of the partition of India (4), the loss of the city’s Hindu majority in the face of sectarian violence after independence (5), the massive construction that took place during the 1960s (6), the epidemic of illegal construction and how people cope with it (7), and the unsuccessful efforts by some to give Karachi a racy tourist-oriented vibe (8). The third part of the book consists of the author’s attempt to understand contemporary Karachi, with chapters on the nature of transportation in and to Karachi (9), the danger that is involved with medical care in Karachi (10), the political conflict over control of Karachi (11), the nature of illegal housing and its relationship to ethnicity and group identity (12), the difficulties of providing affordable housing (13), and the desire of the wealthy to escape through places like Dreamworld (14) from the problems of the city and country around them. The book then closes with a chapter that calls on the renewal of Karachi (15), a note on sources, population charts for various cities, notes, a bibliography, and an index. 

While this book is a dubious use of American taxpayer money–like any other money the author gets from the government for his clueless reportage–it is not as if this book is entirely useless. The author is a clueless sort of person, but his efforts to tie Karachi to the tragedy of post-colonial life is worthwhile in demonstrating that any attempts for the proper development of poor countries needs to include a great deal of focus on making life in the countryside worthwhile and attractive for people so that there is no need to fill up overcrowded cities full of violence. The author makes the comment that the rural economy of Pakistan–and many other countries–is hollowed-out. It is worth exploring why this is the case, and to do so something about, because having people fill up cities and live the sort of existence that requires building illegal settlements and violently defending one’s “temporary settlement” from any and all rivals, and anyone who might be interested in investigating the places is not a sustainable decision for any place that wishes to profit from tourism or business or even wishes to survive in any worthwhile and meaningful sense. If the author has no worthwhile solutions and a worldview that is woefully inadequate to understand the realities of the world around him, at least the author is good at pointing out the problems of Karachi that mirror the problems of many other cities in our contemporary world.